Memeorandum

June 30, 2009

Noam Scheiber reports that the Treasury PPIP is dead, or at least comatose and fading fast. I want to pry this out for a special look:

For what it's worth, I've actually talked to
several Treasury people about this on background in recent weeks. And
while they all tell me the legacy securities part of the PPIP is moving
forward in some form, they generally say they'd be pretty happy if it
turned out the PPIP were unnecessary. In fact, it ties in with
Treasury's view that the Geithner plan was misunderstood in some
quarters from the beginning. The point was not, as one Treasury
official recently told me, to solve the financial crisis by providing
liquidity and magically reviving the prices of toxic assets. (Though
Treasury certainly wouldn't have minded if that happened.)
The point was largely to make it easier for banks to raise capital by
removing the toxic assets from their balance sheet--the thinking being
that the bad assets create uncertainty and generally frighten potential
investors. So with the banks raising capital relatively easy, one can
understand why Treasury isn't disappointed to see the PPIP peter out.

Widely misunderstood? Whomever do they have in mind? I penned severalpostsback in the early days of TARP explaining how the purchase of banks assets *at a fair value* could help recapitalize the banks by (a) improving their asset to capital ratio, and (b) reducing their volatility and making them more appealing to lenders and equity investors frightened by the prospect of bankruptcy. I would say that lefties intent on promoting the nationalization of Citicorp and BofA were also intent on misrepresenting TARP and the ensuing PPIP.

That said, it should be easy enough to dig up the Congressional testimony and press briefings pitching TARP and PPIP. I suspect we will see talk of the promotion of price transparency and maybe less on reducing volatility and attracting private investment than the current Treasury backgrounders would prefer.

Has
technology’s ability to deliver information at such a rapid pace
corrupted us? It’s one thing to marvel at how social media sites have
helped spread Iranian news we might not have attained due to censorship
-- and with such timeliness; it’s quite another to have become a
culture that prizes speed over confirmed facts. Have our standards for
accountability dissolved?

Hmm, we are talking about celebrity-watching here. I don't know what the rules are, if any, but my guess is that speed is prized over accuracy (Let me check that with my high school and college girls...).

The descent into fantasy continues:

“I’m not sure it’s technology that’s breaking down the barriers of accountability,” says Jeffrey Seglin,
author of The Right Thing, a weekly ethics column published by the New
York Times Syndicate. “The National Enquirer broke facts about the O.J.
case before other media outlets did. Matt Drudge reported information
on the Monica Lewinsky affair that Newsweek had been sitting on."

OK, I'll accept the point that gossip and rumor were not invented after Facebook and Twitter. But let's stay with that theme:

“A
curious thing is at play here,” Seglin continues. “Few people expect
TMZ or Drudge or the National Enquirer to get things right or to report
on issues of substance. When they do, at least so far, it’s a bit of an
anomaly. So the consequences for getting it wrong among such sites do
not seem terribly high.

A curious thing is that neither the LA Times nor Mr. Seglin want to mention the John Edwards debacle, broken by the unexpectedly accurate National Enquirer after the national media turned a blind eye to the possible implosion of a major Democratic candidate. What if the Enquirer had been wrong about that? But they weren't! More grist for the LA Times mill...

Last laugher from Mr. Seglin on accuracy and accountability:

That
said, Fox News didn’t take as big a hit as it might have after it was
revealed that the reports it filed on Sarah Palin not knowing Africa
was a continent were based on a hoax.”

Hmm, it's almost as if Democrats and Republicans are treated differently by Big Media. Did Seglin seriously expect the NY Times editors or columnists to ride to the defense of Sarah Palin? Or maybe he thought NBC News would shoulder that burden.

THE REALLY LAST LAUGHER:

Would
TMZ take the same approach to a political figure, which in turn could
pose a threat to national security? Let’s hope we never find out.

I am hoping never to find out what they heck they have in mind with that. But let me offer this promise - if TMZ reports that Obama is dead, or even Joe Biden, I promise to double-check before texting 300 people and posting here.

June 29, 2009

Paul Krugman celebrates his Nobel Prize in Polemics by declaring that all those who disagree with him on global warming are traitors to the planet. No, I am not sure what that means either, but it certainly sets a high rhetorical bar - presumably those who disagree with him on health care reform are traitors to humanity, but what about those who disagree with him on the wisdom of nationalizing Citicorp? Are we merely traitors to our debit cards, or does Krugman contemplate a more dramatic charge?

Well. Let me not come between you and some lunatic ravings:

Temperature increases on the scale predicted by the M.I.T. researchers
and others would create huge disruptions in our lives and our economy.
As a recent authoritative U.S. government report points out, by the end
of this century New Hampshire may well have the climate of North
Carolina today, Illinois may have the climate of East Texas, and across
the country extreme, deadly heat waves — the kind that traditionally
occur only once in a generation — may become annual or biannual events.

Deadly heat waves that only occur once in a generation will soon become annual events. Hmm. My guess is that one major reason a rare, unusual heat wave is so deadly is because - stay with me on this - it is rare and unusual. The good people of the great city of Phoenix have a word for the sort of weather that would be a record breaking heat wave in New York City; that word is "normal". Yet my summer reading does not include headlines of people dropping in the streets of Phoenix like pop flies over the NY Mets infield. Or turn it around - why, one might wonder, does Washington DC struggle during a snow storm that Buffalo would handle with panache? Familiarity may not breed contempt but it inspires preparation.

Heat is already the leading cause of weather-related deaths in the United States. More than 3,400 deaths between 1999 and 2003 were reported as resulting from exposure to excessive heat.

That is about 850 deaths per year. Each untimely death is tragic and Krugman is surely vexed that this number might rise. But by way of comparison, a 2002 study estimated that higher CAFE standards would put Americans in smaller cars and result in an additional 2,000 deaths per year; Krugman, as a party-line progressive, surely supports higher CAFE standards. I denounce Krugman as a traitor to the national highway system! Not to mention as a traitor to the safety of my wife and kids.

And let's press on with the USGCRP "science":

Projections for Chicago suggest that the average number of deaths due to heat waves would more than double by 2050 under a lower emissions scenario91 and quadruple under a high emissions scenario 91 (see figure page 90). 283

The number of deaths will double or quadruple? Geez, that is pretty grim. Of course, as the report notes, the United States population is getting larger, older, fatter, and more diabetic, so all sorts of death rates are rising. Just for starters, since the population is getting older, what is the heat wave related death rate per hundred thousand for folks aged 65 to 85? The USGCRP may know, but they aren't telling - all they deliver is an aggregate deaths per 6 million (but they do tell us that the proportion of the US population over 65 will rise from 12 percent to 21 percent by 2050).

My goodness - if this had been delivered under George Bush earnest libs would have hollered that this slippery presentation represented the worst sort of phony, politicized science . Fortunately, it came out under Obama and tells the story Krugman wants told, so he is delighted to cite it.

Back to Special K:

In other words, we’re facing a clear and present danger to our way of
life, perhaps even to civilization itself. How can anyone justify
failing to act?

Jiminy, Krugman sounds like he just learned he won't be able to chill his white wine. Relax, prof, there will be ice in the future. Annual heat weaves are a clear and present danger unless we can invent air conditioners and remind people to flip them on.

I DEPLORE THIS FALSE EQUIVALENCE: Andrew Sullivan misses the distinction between traitors to the planet and traitors to their party.

BUT SERIOUSLY: We will let Krugman bash Al Gore while we boost Bjorn Lomborg, the Skeptical Environmentalist, in this old piece. Key point:

And just to state the ought-to-be-obvious - Lomborg has parted company
(as have I) with the folks who argue that humans have not contributed
to global warming. His position is that, to whatever extent we have,
global warming is just one of many problems and that making it a top
priority would be a major mis-allocation of resources.

As an economist, this notion of a cost-benefit analysis ought to be familiar to Krugman. Ought to be.

Rivera smiled and said his first run batted in meant more to him than the save.

“But
don’t get me wrong, this is definitely special, being the second guy
who does that in the history of baseball; it’s kind of special,” Rivera
said. “But I’m a team player. My team fought hard today to give me that
opportunity to be there. I tried to do my job. Really, all the 500
saves belong to my teammates.”

And the Captain:

“We’ve played together for 17 years,” Jeter said. “He’s the definition
of consistency. You can line up all the players who ever played the
game. Mo’s been as consistent as anyone. He does it in the regular
season; he does it in the postseason; he does it in spring training; he
did it in the minor leagues. He’s pretty much been successful
everywhere he’s been.”

Rivera's RBI came after Mets closer Francisco Rodriguez intentionally
walked Derek Jeter to load the bases with two outs in the top of the
ninth. K-Rod fell behind Rivera 2-0 before squaring the count. Rivera
then fouled off a 2-2 fastball before walking on a 3-2 pitch to drive
in an insurance run heading to the ninth.

"I just wanted to try to do something,'' Rivera said of the at-bat. "I
guess K-Rod came against me too fine. The pitches he threw were close.''

That is not the half of it. Mariano had come in to get the last out in the bottom of the eighth inning. The Mets brought in their stud closer, K-Rod, to keep the game close in the top of the ninth. As circumstances evolved (Yet another missed pop fly, a walk, and two outs), Derek Jeter came to the plate with men on first and second and Mariano ostensibly on deck.

No team in their right mind would pitch to Jeter when a guy with two regular season at-bats in his career is waiting in the on-deck circle, would they? They might! Although it was unimaginable that the Yankees would lift Rivera and let someone else finish the ninth, the Yankees put a batting helmet on Cervelli, a possible pinch-hitter, and had him wave a bat around while Mariano stayed seated.

K-Rod actually threw Jeter a strike, which left the ESPN announcers aghast. Jeter looked towards the Yankee dugout and started laughing - he either saw Cervelli or heard the Yankees playing the theme music from "The Pink Panther" - and the Mets came to their senses and gave Jeter an intentional pass, with unfortunate results.

AT LEAST A DECADE TOO LATE, BUT STILL: Forget "Enter Sandman" - Mariano's entrance song should have been the theme from "A Fistful of Dollars".

The Supreme Court should release its decision in the New Haven firefighters case today.

[UPDATE: Sotomayor is overturned 5-4, which preserves her cred as a reliable liberal:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court has ruled that white
firefighters in New Haven, Conn., were unfairly denied promotions
because of their race, reversing a decision that high court nominee
Sonia Sotomayor endorsed as an appeals court judge.

New Haven was wrong to scrap a promotion exam because no
African-Americans and only two Hispanic firefighters were likely to be
made lieutenants or captains based on the results, the court said
Monday in a 5-4 decision. The city said that it had acted to avoid a
lawsuit from minorities.

The ruling could alter employment practices nationwide, potentially
limiting the circumstances in which employers can be held liable for
decisions when there is no evidence of intentional discrimination
against minorities.

"Fear of litigation alone cannot justify an employer's reliance on
race to the detriment of individuals who passed the examinations and
qualified for promotions," Justice Anthony Kennedy said in his opinion
for the court. He was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices
Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

This won't be that awkward for Sotomayor - she is a liberal judge with, at least on this case, mainstream liberal views. But it will be helpful to give the Senate Democrats an opportunity to defend her position.

First, Justice Ginsburg's dissent contains an interesting footnote
-- Footnote 10 -- suggesting that she and the other dissenters were
prepared to vacate and remand the case as recommended by the Obama
Administration's amicus brief.

10. The lower courts focused on respondents’ “intent” rather than onwhether respondents in fact had good cause to act. See
554 F. Supp. 2d 142, 157 (Conn. 2006). Ordinarily, a remand for fresh
consideration would be in order. But the Court has seen fit to preclude
further proceedings. I therefore explain why, if final adjudication by
this Court is indeed appropriate, New Haven should be the prevailing
party.

This would suggest that even the Court's dissenters
believed that the Second Circuit did not properly address the issues
raised by the New Haven firefighters, even if they would adopt a
standard that would make it difficult for the firefighters to prevail.

The non-PC Steve Sailer has fun with Emily Bazelon of Slate, who looks with disfavor on family ties and acquired expertise in mundane matters such as saving people's lives but presumably has a different view for important matters such as law school admissions. A snippet of his Big Finish:

I looked up
"Emily
Bazelon" on Wikipedia (accessed 16.59 ET, June 28
2009) and discovered that while she’s very bright, she’s not exactly the most self-aware person. When read in light of her biography, her Slate article about privileged white firemen becomes an amusing epitome of unthinking Gown v. Town prejudice.

More strikingly, the legal journalist’s grandfather David Bazelon was the most powerful judge in America not on the Supreme Court when he served from 1962-1978 as Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
Indeed, considering his close relationship with the Svengali of the Warren Court,
William J. Brennan, quite possibly Bazelon was more powerful than several Supreme Court Justices.

June 28, 2009

Is this really as good as it gets? Jack is back with more "evidence" that Bill Ayers was involved in authoring Obama's "Dreams From My Father".

Jonah Goldberg is utterly unimpressed by the lead tidbit which is that both Ayers and Obama misquoted the well-known description of Chicago as "hog butcher to the world".

As for them both getting the quote wrong, so what? I would bet that
most, or at least a great many, people get that quote wrong in the same
way. If you search Google Books, you'll find 605 books or excerpts
using the "to" and 655 using "for." If you search Nexis you'll find 536
instances of "to" and only 382 of "for."

I scored it as roughly 5,000 Google hits for the wrong quote and 8,000 for the correct one. Not exactly decisive.

Mr. Goldberg was kind enough to gloss over the next bit of "evidence", which is either presented opaquely or is some of the worst forensic work I have seen:

I read through all 759
matches and culled out those that I would consider B-Level or above.
There were 180 of these. As a control, I tested them against my own
2006 book Sucker Punch, like Dreams and Fugitive Days
a memoir that deals extensively with race. In that I am closer to
Ayers in age, race, education, family and cultural background than
Obama is, our styles should have had more chance of matching. They
don't. Of the 180 examples, I matched, strictly speaking, on six.
Even by the most generous standard, we matched on only sixteen.

So let me see if I understand. A careful reader identified 180 matches between Ayers' work and Obama's that Mr. Cashill considered to be "B-level or above". Mr. Cashill only matched at most sixteen of those phrases or features in his own writing, thereby proving... what?

What is the baseline? For the exercise to be meaningful, a careful reader would need to go through Mr. Cashill's work and compare it directly to Ayers. If that were done, they might well find 164 other Cashill-Ayers matches which, combined with the 16 in hand, resulted in a total of 180 matches in all. And since Obama would not be a match on these 164 new entries, I guess we would conclude that Ayers was the author of Cashill's work.

Or maybe a careful reader would undertake a third comparison and discover Cashill and Obama match on 164 unique new points, thereby proving that Mr. Cashill was the author of "Dreams" and could save us a lot of time by simply admitting it.

That said, perhaps a careful, objective reader would establish that the Cashill-Ayers matches only total 30, which might lead us to wonder whether the Obama-Ayers match rate is unusually high. But right now, we have no baseline at all and no reason to think that Obama, Ayers and Cashill all ought to match on the same phrases.

The third bit of evidence also falls flat:

Rather astonishingly, as Mr. West points out, at least six of the characters in Dreams have the same names as characters in Ayers' books: Malik, Freddy, Tim, Coretta, Marcus, and "the old man."

"The old man" - geez, I never thought I would see that in a book, ha, get it, "See", Old Man", Sea.... But semi-seriously, folks - six names match out of how many? Surely it makes a difference whether the two authors only have six named characters, or each presents a cast encompassing the Chicago phone book.

OK, I can't stop - the next bit of evidence is this:

In one instance, Obama
reflects on his own first days as a ten year-old at his Hawaiian prep
school, a transition complicated by the presence of "Coretta," the only
other black student in the class.

When
the other students accuse Obama of having a girlfriend, Obama shoves
Coretta and insists that she leave him alone. Although "his act of
betrayal" buys him a reprieve from the other students, Obama
understands that he "had been tested and found wanting."

Ayers relates a parallel story in Parent. He tells of a useful reading assignment from the 1992 book, The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas, by
black author Reginald McKnight. The passage in question deals with the
travails of Clint, the first black student in a newly integrated
school, who repudiates Marvin, the only other black boy in the school.
Upon reflection, Clint thinks, "I was ashamed. Ashamed for not
defending Marvin and ashamed that Marvin even existed."

Wow - the theme of guilt following a self-serving betrayal never shows up anywhere in literature. Maybe Ayers wrote the New Testament story of Judas, too. This is real breakthrough stuff.

Imagine a benevolent single buyer of health care services. Forget
about whether or not it could be a government; let's just focus on the
logic of the model. I can think of a few scenarios:

1. The buyer bargains down price and suppliers in turn lower quantity.

2.
The buyer bargains down price and the monopolizing suppliers respond by
expanding quantity. The monopsonist moves us to a more competitive
solution. Note that under this option the direct institution of more
competition could have the same effects.

If #2 is true, you might
expect supply restrictions to be an important issue. That is, the
people who favor monopsony should also favor greater competitiveness on
the supply side. Yet this does not seem like a current priority. I
hardly ever see talk of deregulating medical licensing, allowing
paramedics and nurses to perform more basic medical functions, or
abolishing other entry restrictions. I do recall that an earlier
version of Obama's plan, struck down by Congress, would have created a
nationwide insurance market. There was no big fight, either in the
administration or in the blogosphere.

Those who favor monopsony
might have another model in mind. In this model there are many medical
suppliers but each supplier still has a fair degree of ex post
monopoly power. Search costs, non-transparency, lock-in, and consumer
irrationality can generate this kind of result. And in these models
allowing for more entry needn't much help the basic problem.

Under #2, which other policies will help set this market right? What are the possible policy substitutes for monopsony?

I suspect that one of the more important articles on health care was delivered in the New Yorker a few weeks back:

The Cost Conundrum
What a Texas town can teach us about health care.

Atul Gawande
June 1, 2009

Here is the NPR summary:

It seems nearly impossible to read about or listen to a discussion
about health-care reform for any length of time these days without
someone mentioning the New Yorker article
by Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon and writer who examines the reasons why
the small Texas city of McAllen has some of the highest health-care
costs in the country and significantly more than El Paso, Tex., a city
in the same region with very similar demographics.

The answer, Gawande found, was that the doctors in McAllen were over ordering all kinds of medical tests and treatments.

The New Yorker piece apparently became required reading in the White House and was cited by Budget Director Peter Orszag when responding to Virgina Postrel. Here is the Budget Director's take-away:

But, today, the American health care system doesn’t always reward
the best medical innovations – and one need look no further than McAllen, Texas to see that this is so.

Despite having a demographic profile similar to El Paso, Texas,
and despite having had similar Medicare expenditures as El Paso as
recently as 1992, McAllen’s spending grew about five times faster in
the years since than in either El Paso or the United States as a
whole. In return, McAllen got more medicine (more tests, more
surgeries, more time in waiting rooms), but it didn’t get better health
– McAllen scores lower than El Paso (and the U.S. average) in measures
of health care quality. McAllen "innovated," and certain doctors and
hospitals were financially rewarded, but I think we can all agree that
this isn’t the kind of innovation we desire.

This is the sort of market behavior that a powerful, centralized system might avoid. However, the Health Care Value blog makes this point about controlling costs:

First, as we know in every aspect of our lives, human beings respond to economic incentives. In the past decade, no other profession
in America has suffered a decline in inflation-adjusted income like
physicians. It is curious that we trust physicians to be smart enough
to heal us but assume that they will not attempt to stymie consistent
actual and threatened reductions in their income.

Well, there is that.

At a deeper level, the Gawande/New Yorker comparison of McAllen with El Paso and Grand Junction, Colrado may founder on patient demographics and prior access to health care. The Health Care blog runs numbers for the Medicare populations in the three areas and makes these points:

According to Gawande, McAllen Texas
has a physician culture that promotes high cost, low quality care. By
comparison El Paso is portrayed as having a similar patient population
to McAllen with lower costs of care. Grand Junction, Colorado,
however, the antithesis of McAllen according to the article, is credited
with having a physician culture that promotes low costs and high quality.
Ultimately Gawande warns that by failing to change the physician culture
nationally, “McAllen won’t be an outlier. It will be our future.”
But is McAllen really an outlier, a harbinger of physician income-enhancing
practices run amok?

A fair comparison between McAllen
and Grand Junction would include a more precise analytic methodology
than could be offered in Dr. Gawande’s article. Such an analysis
is important: the correct diagnosis of the health care cost crisis is
an essential step in selecting an effective prescription. If McAllen
is not an outlier and Grand Junction is not a paragon, then the solution
is not to simply tamp down variation by exporting Grand Junction values
to McAllen. If the physician practices reported by Dr. Gawande
in McAllen lead to explainable patterns of costs according to current
norms, then those practices are part of a national phenomenon right
now, not in a nightmare future.

An analysis of the Medicare population
in the three counties can place Dr. Gawande’s observations in a more
complete context. Medicare beneficiaries enjoy a standardized
benefit package, and detailed data are available on the services they
receive. We can use cost data for Medicare enrollees in the three
counties to test Dr. Gawande’s assertions regarding McAllen’s and
Grand Junction’s comparative health care costs.

And eventually we come to charts indicating that the Medicare patients in McAllen seem to have a lot more medical problems than their counterparts in El Paso and Grand Junction. However:

Many of the disease rates for the
McAllen population are more than double those for Grand Junction.
If the Medicare population in McAllen is truly that much sicker wouldn’t
we expect the payments to be greater? A comparison of expenditures
for Medicare enrollees without
a diagnosis of diabetes or heart disease in the last year shows that
costs for these standard populations are statistically very close (Exhibit
5).

Exhibit
5: Medicare Monthly Payments per Patient without a Diagnosis in the
Year for Diabetes or Heart Disease, 2006

Row
Labels

Medicare Enrollees

Monthly Per Person Payments

McAllen,
Texas

28,680

$3,147

El
Paso, Texas

47,960

$2,564

Grand
Junction, Colorado

11,160

$3,307

By eliminating diabetes, ischemic
heart disease or heart failure from the population payment measures
the Grand Junction advantage is completely removed. Grand Junction
is just as costly as McAllen for populations without one of these conditions.

I guess that leaves plenty of other ailments for which people might be treated. On the other hand, my reservation about this chart is that it is much harder to overtreat a healthy person.

So, is McAllen an example of a flawed market culture in which doctors overuse and overbill the system in order to prop up their own incomes, or are its higher expenses due to a poorer and sicker population? I hope Peter Orszag gets the right answer.

The Times recently had a story noting that hot rocks could power the world. Step one is to drill deep for hot rocks; this technology has been pioneered by the oil and gas people.

Step two is to put water down the hole; step three is to capture the resulting steam to power a turbine and generate electricity. As an MIT reportexplained, none of this requires any dramatic technological breakthroughs, a geothermal plant can provide steady, reliable baseload power with inconsequential carbon emissions, and the available energy stored as heat beneath the earth's crust is vast. The US currently gets more electricity from geothermal than from wind and solar combined, and, per an estimate reported in the Times, could get 15% of our electricity from geothermal by 2030.

There is just one tiny problem - did we mention the earthquakes?

BASEL, Switzerland — Markus O. Häring, a former oilman, was a hero
in this city of medieval cathedrals and intense environmental passion
three years ago, all because he had drilled a hole three miles deep
near the corner of Neuhaus Street and Shafer Lane.

He was prospecting for a vast source of clean, renewable energy that seemed straight out of a Jules Verne novel: the heat simmering within the earth’s bedrock.

All seemed to be going well — until Dec. 8, 2006, when the project
set off an earthquake, shaking and damaging buildings and terrifying
many in a city that, as every schoolchild here learns, had been
devastated exactly 650 years before by a quake that sent two steeples
of the Münster Cathedral tumbling into the Rhine.

Hastily shut down, Mr. Häring’s project was soon forgotten by nearly everyone outside Switzerland. As early as this week, though, an American start-up company, AltaRock Energy,
will begin using nearly the same method to drill deep into ground laced
with fault lines in an area two hours’ drive north of San Francisco.

Residents of the region, which straddles Lake and Sonoma Counties,
have already been protesting swarms of smaller earthquakes set off by a
less geologically invasive set of energy projects there. AltaRock
officials said that they chose the spot in part because the history of
mostly small quakes reassured them that the risks were limited.

Hmm, California being tossed into the ocean - that is right out of Superman. As an old fan of Dr. J and his Sixers I could have done with a bit less of LA, but this seems like overkill.

Let's put this in the "Thank Heaven for Undersecretaries" file:

Steven E. Koonin, the under secretary for science at the Energy
Department, said the earthquake issue was new to him, but added, “We’re
committed to doing things in a factual and rigorous way, and if there
is a problem, we will attend to it.”

The earthquake issue was new to him? Dr. Koonin, an Obama appointment, has a brilliant resume, but he ought to get a subscription to the Wikipedia, which tells us this about the environmental impact of geothermal power in the third paragraph:

To stimulate the reservoir for a proposed "hot dry rock" geothermal
project in the city of Basel, approximately 11500 m3 of water were
injected between December 2nd and 8th, 2006, at high pressures into a 5
km deep well. A six-sensor borehole array, installed at depths between
300 and 2700 meters around the well to monitor the induced seismicity,
recorded more than 10500 events during the injection phase. Events with
magnitudes as low as ML 0.7 were also recorded by regional networks in
Switzerland, Germany and France, as well as by up to 30 strong-motion
stations installed in the epicentral area. Due to excessive seismic
activity, that included an ML 2.7 event, injection had already been
stopped when a few hours later an ML 3.4 event jolted the city of Basel.

I don't have the impression that the people who studied the Basel situation are still puzzling over the gross cause and effect, although the Times tells us that others seem to be:

Like the effort in Basel, the new project will tap geothermal
energy by fracturing hard rock more than two miles deep to extract its
heat. AltaRock, founded by Susan Petty, a veteran geothermal
researcher, has secured more than $36 million from the Energy
Department, several large venture-capital firms, including Kleiner
Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Google. AltaRock maintains that it will steer clear of large faults and that it can operate safely.

But in a report on seismic impact that AltaRock was required to
file, the company failed to mention that the Basel program was shut
down because of the earthquake it caused. AltaRock claimed it was
uncertain that the project had caused the quake, even though Swiss
government seismologists and officials on the Basel project agreed that
it did. Nor did AltaRock mention the thousands of smaller earthquakes
induced by the Basel project that continued for months after it shut
down.

Troubling - this seems like the sort of behavior that could give a great idea a bad reputation. And with funding from the 'Don't be evil" crowd from Google, no less.

We took extraordinary care in choosing our site at the Geysers
to avoid siting on a major fault. The Basel Project drilled into a
significant fault.Read More

Basel sits on top of a large (200 kilometer long) "locked" fault that
previously ruptured and heavily damaged the city in the 14th century.
Over the course of a year, we reviewed nine different sites in North
America. We carefully chose our site to avoid Basel's problems. There
has been geothermal energy production at the Geysers since 1965.
AltaRock's project is located in a seismically active area adjacent to
smaller faults (the closest faults are 3 & 11 kilometers long)
which are not "locked" due the constant stress relief resulting from
small seismic movements.

Smaller faults mean smaller events, and the faults in the Geysers area are significantly smaller than at Basel.Read More

The Geysers is a seismically active area with many smaller faults
unconnected to larger and longer faults located elsewhere in CA.
Smaller faults produce smaller magnitude events. Basel's geology is
very different. In the over 40 years of geothermal energy production at
the Geysers, induced seismicity events have been extensively studied
and very modest and are expected to be no different with AltaRock's
project, which will involve two geothermal wells in an existing field
of more than 350 wells.

June 27, 2009

WASHINGTON — The House passed legislation on Friday intended to address global warming and transform the way the nation produces and uses energy.

The vote was the first time either house of Congress had approved a
bill meant to curb the heat-trapping gases scientists have linked to
climate change. The legislation, which passed despite deep divisions
among Democrats, could lead to profound changes in many sectors of the
economy, including electric power generation, agriculture,
manufacturing and construction.The bill’s passage, by 219 to
212, with 44 Democrats voting against it, also established a marker for
the United States when international negotiations on a new climate
change treaty begin later this year.

Now that theyhave passed it we (and they) have time to read it. Passing a bill prior to the upcoming Copenhagen negotiations in December is important to the Administration strategy. This is from William Antholis of Brookings, in a June speech:

One key nuance should not be ignored. Rather than try to get 67 votes [to ratify a climate treaty in the Senate] after
a negotiation to ratify an agreement, the hope of supporters of
Waxman-Markey is to simply pass a domestic law first, and base the
international negotiations on that law. In the best of all worlds, that
would happen before the Copenhagen agreement, as a way of sending a
signal to the world that the U.S. has actually adopted a climate change
law. There is a strong preference to have all of this happen before
Copenhagen so that the U.S. does not pass a law because the
international community has told it to pass. That is particularly true
in the Senate, which guards U.S. sovereignty with all the religious
fervor that was associated with that word when the Thirty Year’s War
gripped this continent six hundred years ago.

While we are Brookings, let's recycle Gregg Easterbrook from 2006, when he made the case for action on global warming and declared the case to be closed.

And to be fair and balanced let's toss in Dr. William Happer, a Princeton physicist and global warming skeptic.

ROME — The Obama administration’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan told allies on Saturday that the United States was shifting its drug policy in Afghanistan away from eradicating opium poppy fields and toward interdicting drug supplies and cultivating alternative crops.

“The Western policies against the opium crop, the poppy crop, have been a failure,” the envoy, Richard C. Holbrooke, told reporters on the margins of the Group of 8 conference in the northern Italian city of Trieste, Reuters reported. “They did not result in any damage to the Taliban, but they put farmers out of work and they alienated people and drove people into the arms of the Taliban.”

Mr.
Holbrooke said the United States would begin phasing out eradication
efforts, which generally have involved spraying or plowing under poppy
fields, often under fire from Taliban militants or angry farmers.
Instead, he said, more emphasis would be placed on helping Afghan
farmers make a living through other crops and on seizing both drugs
coming out of the country and growing and processing supplies coming in.

And let's thank heaven for experts:

Vanda Felbab-Brown, a fellow at the Brookings Institution
and an expert on counternarcotics, called the administration’s shift
away from eradication and toward stimulating the rural economy
“courageous” and “absolutely right.”

But she added that it was
imperative for the United States “to set the right expectations,” and
make it clear that it was unlikely that the new policy “will result in
a substantial reduction of cultivation or on the dependence on the
illegal economy.”

It's courageous, it's the right thing to do, but it won't work. Great. And the next Administration can find yet another rope up which they will pee.

Chemicals used to isolate morphine from opium include
ammonium chloride, calcium carbonate (limestone), and calcium hydroxide (slaked
lime). The precursor chemical normally used in the conversion of morphine to
heroin is acetic anhydride. Chemical reagents used in the conversion process
include sodium carbonate and activated charcoal. Chemical solvents needed are
chloroform, ethyl alcohol (ethanol), ethyl ether and acetone. Other chemicals
may be substituted for these preferred chemicals, but most or all of these
preferred chemicals are readily available through smugglers and suppliers.

The potency of interval training is nothing new. Many athletes have
been straining through interval sessions once or twice a week along
with their regular workout for years. But what researchers have been
looking at recently is whether humans, like that second group of rats,
can increase endurance with only a few minutes of strenuous exercise,
instead of hours? Could it be that most of us are spending more time
than we need to trying to get fit?

The answer is "maybe":

“There was a time when the scientific literature suggested that the
only way to achieve endurance was through endurance-type activities,”
such as long runs or bike rides or, perhaps, six-hour swims, says
Martin Gibala, PhD, chairman of the Department of Kinesiology at
McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. But ongoing research from
Gibala’s lab is turning that idea on its head. In one of the group’s
recent studies, Gibala and his colleagues had a group of college
students, who were healthy but not athletes, ride a stationary bike at
a sustainable pace for between 90 and 120 minutes. Another set of
students grunted through a series of short, strenuous intervals: 20 to
30 seconds of cycling at the highest intensity the riders could stand.
After resting for four minutes, the students pedaled hard again for
another 20 to 30 seconds, repeating the cycle four to six times
(depending on how much each person could stand), “for a total of two to
three minutes of very intense exercise per training session,” Gibala
says.

Two intense minutes three times a week results in the six minutes in the headline. But allowing for a warm-up and cool down, as well as four minutes between intervals, suggests a time commitment of about 30 minutes three times a week. That is well less than the 90 to 120 minutes per session expended by the conventional exercise riders, but still.

On to the results:

Each of the two groups exercised three times a week. After two weeks,
both groups showed almost identical increases in their endurance (as
measured in a stationary bicycle time trial), even though the one group
had exercised for six to nine minutes per week, and the other about
five hours. Additionally, molecular changes that signal increased
fitness were evident equally in both groups. “The number and size of
the mitochondria within the muscles” of the students had increased
significantly, Gibala says, a change that, before this work, had been
associated almost exclusively with prolonged endurance training. Since
mitochondria enable muscle cells to use oxygen to create energy,
“changes in the volume of the mitochondria can have a big impact on
endurance performance.” In other words, six minutes or so a week of
hard exercise (plus the time spent warming up, cooling down, and
resting between the bouts of intense work) had proven to be as good as
multiple hours of working out for achieving fitness.

Very interesting, but...

1. Is two weeks a useful measure of an exercise "program"? Would this result hold up for a forty or fifty-something who has been exercising regularly since high school?

2. It's not the destination, its the journey. As the article goes on to note, the interval training is quite painful. Now, some people actually enjoy wind sprints, suicides, and gassers (My hand is raised!) but my guess is that anyone who will engage in that sort of self-inflicted torment probably likes the whole exercising experience and is not focused on saving time on a regular basis. Let's put it this way - there is probably a study showing that film buffs could save a lot of time by skipping directly to the plot summaries available at IMDB, but I bet they don't.

3. What about revealed preference? Plenty of prefessional athletes have tried all sorts of things to improve their fitness. My guess is that if an exclusive emphasis on interval training produced better results Jerry Rice, Michael Jordan or Karl Malone would have figured it out. Or Olympic coaches, or the Navy SEALS.

Rice’s six-day-a-week workout is divided into two parts: two hours of cardiovascular
work in the morning and three hours of strength training each
afternoon. Early in the off-season, the a.m. segment consists of a
five-mile trail run near San Carlos on a torturous course called,
simply, The Hill. But since five vertical miles can hardly be
considered a workout, he pauses on the steepest section to do a series
of ten 40-meter uphill sprints. As the season approaches, however, Rice
knows it’s time to start conserving energy - so he forgoes The Hill and
instead merely does a couple of sprints: six 100-yarders, six 80s, six
60s, six 40s, six 20s, and 16 tens, with no rest between sprints and
just two and a half minutes between sets.

For the p.m. sessions he alternates between upper-body and
lower-body days. But no matter which half of his body he’s working on,
the volume is always the same: three sets of ten reps of 21 different
exercises. Yes, your calculator’s right: That’s 630 repetitions a day.

Rice described something similar here:

A typical workout for me started around 7:00 a.m.
I’m at the track. I may do about eight 200s without stopping. You do the 200s running first and then jog until you reach back to the starting line where you start running again. Then I do ten 100s, eight 60s and six 40s. After that, I then go down to the football field. That’s where I do my route running and cone drills. It’s all about getting your feet up and down so you know where you are on the football field and being able to explode. Football is about stop and go.

If any athlete embodies the value of strength and conditioning,
it's Malone, who concedes that his highly disciplined fitness regimen
could be viewed as obsessive.

During the off-season, he works out from 7 a.m. to noon each day, stretching, lifting weights and mixing in some cardio work.

His well-honed physique is built upon rotating heavy and light weights
and concentrating on just two or three major muscle groups per day. For
example, chest, shoulder and back one day; calves, thighs and stomach
the next.

He typically wraps up a workout with 40 minutes on a
treadmill, another 40 minutes on an elliptical trainer and 30 minutes
on a stationary bike. Sometimes, he'll follow this program for three
weeks without taking a single day of rest. (Of course, no personal
trainer would recommend working out every day for three weeks without
breaks.) And by the way, he never even picks up a basketball during the
off season.

OK, having read that I am going to take two Advil and rest for a spell.

“The Steelers have a really good strength coach (Garrett Giemont).
Some of the guys that come down, they’re still doing the strength
program and they’re not trying to get out of anything. They still
contact him. They follow his plan really well. It’s just the
camaraderie of the group all in Florida.”

Most drills are relatively short and concentrate on developing
speed, power, agility, reaction time and quickness. Holmes and other
receivers are requried to run 10 consecutive pass patterns as a way of
developing the stamina required to play in a game.

“He’s doing 10 routes in less than one minute, 45 seconds, and then
he has two minutes rest,” Shaw said. “And then we’re going to work our
way to five sets so that he’ll be able to run 50 routes, which he may
not do in a whole game.

“One day we’re doing speed work, the next day we’re doing cutting
with metabolics. We’re training to be (position) specific so you can go
back and last the whole season. It’s stuff to get their bodies to
recover.”

Hmm, where am I headed here? I doubt Usain Bolt is logging five and ten mile training runs, but I am also pretty sure that top distance runners are not totally ignoring the long mileage runs.

The Pakistani military continues their push in Waziristan. From, Reuters:

WANA, Pakistan (Reuters) - Pakistani warplanes killed at least a
dozen Taliban fighters on Saturday, in a strike on their stronghold
near the Afghan border, while police in the southern city of Karachi
shot dead five militants.

U.S. officials have issued a steady stream of praise for Pakistan
since the government first took the decision to go on the offensive
against the militants over two months ago.

Operations in Swat and Buner, two valleys north of the capital of
Islamabad, are in their final stages and the focus has switched to the
stronghold of Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud in South
Waziristan, a remote tribal region bordering Afghanistan.

The air raid on Saturday on Mehsud's mountainous redoubt was the
latest in a series over recent weeks, and the government has already
given orders for the military to mount an all-out assault.

The army is still assembling its forces in South Waziristan, and
some diplomats expect some of the troops fighting in Swat to be moved
there soon.

June 26, 2009

Scalia and Thomas took a hard originalist line on a defendant right to confront his accusers; in alliance with three bleeding hearts (Souter, Stevens, and Ginsburg) to reach a decision that will vex prosecutors and strain state and municipal budgets:

WASHINGTON — Crime laboratory reports may not be used against
criminal defendants at trial unless the analysts responsible for
creating them give testimony and subject themselves to
cross-examination, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday in a 5-to-4 decision.

The ruling was an extension of a 2004 decision that breathed new
life into the Sixth Amendment’s confrontation clause, which gives a
criminal defendant the right “to be confronted with the witnesses
against him.”

Four dissenting justices said that scientific evidence should be
treated differently than, say, statements from witnesses to a crime.
They warned that the decision would subject the nation’s criminal
justice system to “a crushing burden” and that it means “guilty
defendants will go free, on the most technical grounds.”

The two sides differed sharply about the practical consequences of requiring testimony from crime laboratory analysts. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy,
writing for the four dissenters, said Philadelphia’s 18 drug analysts
will now each be required to testify in more than 69 trials next year,
and Cleveland’s six drug analysts in 117 trials each.

Noting that 500 employees of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
laboratory in Quantico, Va., conduct more than a million scientific
tests each year, Justice Kennedy wrote, “The court’s decision means
that before any of those million tests reaches a jury, at least one of
the laboratory’s analysts must board a plane, find his or her way to an
unfamiliar courthouse and sit there waiting to read aloud notes made
months ago.”

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, scoffed at those “back-of-the-envelope calculations.”

In any event, he added, the court is not entitled to ignore even an unwise constitutional command for reasons of convenience.

“The confrontation clause may make the prosecution of criminals more
burdensome, but that is equally true of the right to trial by jury and
the privilege against self-incrimination,” Justice Scalia wrote.

“The sky will not fall after today’s decision,” he added.

But that is not how prosecutors saw it. “It’s a train wreck,” Scott
Burns, the executive director of the National District Attorneys
Association, said of the decision.

As an alternative to a tedious tome on Waxman-Markey the American Enterprise Institute offers colorful quotes from their experts. Some snippets:

Steven F. Hayward writes on a wide range of public policy issues. He is the coauthor of the annual Index of Leading Environmental Indicators; the producer and host of An Inconvenient Truth . . . or Convenient Fiction?, a rebuttal to Al Gore's documentary; and the author of many books on environmental topics. He contributes to AEI's Energy and Environment Outlook series.

Hayward
quote: "Waxman-Markey is a bundle of contradictions. It seeks to make
carbon more expensive, but does not want any consumer to pay higher
energy prices--at least for the first decade of its operation. It seeks
a first in economic history--it wants to have rationing without
scarcity or price inflation.

...The "cap and trade" system at the heart of the bill is riddled with so
many loopholes that it should be considered more of a 'hairnet and
giveaway.'"

Pencil him in as "Undecided".

Samuel Thernstrom has studied and written about environmental issues
for twenty years, with a particular emphasis on global climate change.
He served on the White House Council on Environmental Quality prior to
joining AEI in 2003. As codirector of the AEI Geoengineering Project,
Mr. Thernstrom studies the policy implications of geoengineering--a new
way to deal with global warming by blocking a small fraction of the
sunlight that would otherwise warm the Earth's surface. His recent
op-ed in the Washington Post discusses the possibility of engineering a cooler planet: http://www.aei.org/article/100625.

Thernstrom
quote: ...While proponents can cite the
importance of establishing the first federal limits on greenhouse gas
emissions, honest environmentalists are profoundly disappointed in the
bill's fundamental flaws. This bill builds upon the Kyoto Protocol's
record of failure, rather than learning valuable lessons from those
mistakes. I agree with NASA climate scientist James Hansen, who said recently 'I
hope cap and trade doesn’t pass, because we need a much more effective
approach.'"

Hmm - can we call that "Undecided, but doesn't realize it yet"? C'mon, Nancy has until the Fourth of July to bash this through the House.

ANY DAY NOW: The Brookings Institute sneak-previewed their upcoming report on the economic impact of climate change back on June 8 but it was not a specic look at Waxman-Markey.

Pages 17 and 18 show their estimate of the impact on GDP of different reduction strategies out to 2050. Folks who focus on the direct comparison of GDP (p. 17) will argue that their is virtually no impact. On the other hand, page 18 indicates that GDP is reduced by 1% to 2.5% per year. On a $14 trillion economy, that is a cost of $140 to $350 billion per year, an amount which ought to be able to hold people's attention.

June 25, 2009

March 27 (Bloomberg) -- Subsidizing renewable energy in the
U.S. may destroy two jobs for every one created if Spain’s
experience with windmills and solar farms is any guide.

For every new position that depends on energy price
supports, at least 2.2 jobs in other industries will disappear,
according to a study from King Juan Carlos University in Madrid.

U.S. President Barack Obama’s 2010 budget proposal contains
about $20 billion in tax incentives for clean-energy programs.
In Spain, where wind turbines provided 11 percent of power
demand last year, generators earn rates as much as 11 times more
for renewable energy compared with burning fossil fuels.

The premiums paid for solar, biomass, wave and wind power -
- which are charged to consumers in their bills -- translated
into a $774,000 cost for each Spanish “green job” created
since 2000, said Gabriel Calzada, an economics professor at the
university and author of the report.

“The loss of jobs could be greater if you account for the
amount of lost industry that moves out of the country due to
higher energy prices,” he said in an interview.

And while on the topic of forcing up energy costs, QandO notes that Waxman-Markey lays the foundation for a trade war. This is from the Times story to which he links:

A House committee working on sweeping energy legislation seems
determined to make sure that the United States will tax China and other
carbon polluters, potentially disrupting an already-sensitive climate
change debate in Congress.

The Ways and Means Committee's proposed bill language (pdf)
would virtually require that the president impose an import tariff on
any country that fails to clamp down on greenhouse gas emissions.

Directed primarily at China, the United States' biggest
manufacturing competitor, the provisions aim to protect cement, steel
and other energy-intensive industries that expect to face higher costs
under a federal emissions cap. But associations that represent
importers and multinational corporations are raising red flags, warning
that the language could lead to trade wars, hurt the United States'
ability to export low-carbon technology and harm consumers.

The Supremes smack the Arizona school officials who asked a 13 year old girl to shake it down so they could check her for prescription ibuprofen (Advil, to you non-druggies...). The decision was 8-1 with a dissent from Clarence Thomas:

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a school's strip search of an Arizona teenage girl accused of having prescription-strength ibuprofen was illegal.

In
an 8-1 ruling, the justices said school officials violated the law with
their search of Savana Redding in the rural eastern Arizona town of Safford.

Redding,
who now attends college, was 13 when officials at Safford Middle School
ordered her to remove her clothes and shake out her underwear because
they were looking for pills — the equivalent of two Advils. The
district bans prescription and over-the-counter drugs and the school
was acting on a tip from another student.

However, good news for taxpayers:

The court also ruled the officials cannot be held liable in a
lawsuit for the search. Different judges around the nation have come to
different conclusions about immunity for school officials in strip
searches, which leads the Supreme Court to "counsel doubt that we were sufficiently clear in the prior statement of law," Souter said.

"We
think these differences of opinion from our own are substantial enough
to require immunity for the school officials in this case," Souter said.

The justices also said the lower courts would have to determine whether the Safford United School District No. 1 could be held liable.

From Real Clear Politics we learn that the legislators Down Under are on the brink of rejecting Australia's version of cap and trade legislation on CO2:

An April 29 article in The Australian described the general trend—and its leading cause.

There is rising recognition that introduction of a
carbon tax under the guise of "cap and trade" will be personally
costly, economically disruptive to society and tend to shift classes of
jobs offshore. Moreover, despite rising carbon dioxide concentrations,
global warming seems to have taken a holiday….

With public perceptions changing so dramatically and quickly it is little wonder Ian Plimer's latest book, Heaven and Earth, Global Warming: The Missing Science,
has been received with such enthusiasm and is into its third print run
in as many weeks. [It's now up to the fifth printing.]

The public is receptive to an exposé of the many mythologies and
false claims associated with anthropogenic global warming and are
welcoming an authoritative description of planet Earth and its
ever-changing climate in readable language.

And that's what makes Plimer so influential—not just his credibility as
a scientist, but the righteous certainty with which he dismisses
man-made global warming as an unscientific dogma. He writes:
"The Emissions Trading Scheme legislation poises Australia to make the
biggest economic decision in its history"—Australia generates 80% of
its electricity from coal, which would essentially be outlawed—"yet
there has been no scientific due diligence. There has never been a
climate change debate in Australia. Only dogma."

Apparently the US edition of Plimer's book goes on sale July 1, but Amazon has it now.

Hordes of cheering children, parents, teachers and volunteers welcomed
first lady Michelle Obama to a playground-in-progress in San
Francisco's Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood Monday, where the
president's wife joined California first lady Maria Shriver in building
a play structure and saluting community volunteers.

..."This new Obama administration doesn't view service as something
separate from our national priorities. ... We have an administration
that understands that service is the key to achieving our national
priorities," she said. "For far too long, we've viewed service in our
communities as largely separate from our policies in government."

Uh huh - because no other national leader has ever given even a nod towards the benefits of community service. Just off hand, there is John Kennedy's Peace Corps, Jimmy Carter with his Habitat for Humanity, John Edwards with various self-promoting schemes he dropped after his Presidential hopes collapsed, Bush 41's "Thousand Pints of Light (Beer)", Clinton's Americorps, and the Bush 43 USA Freedom Corps.

Of course, if Michelle is thinking about a full Federal takeover of the volunteer movement, well, her husband is advancing that agenda.

Like so many of our friends on the left, Marcy Wheeler has more fun imagining and recycling conspiracy theories than verifying them. Hence her provocative headline denouncing the AP coverage of the Nico Pitney / Huffington Post media flap about the White House planting a question about Iran at Obama's press conference.

The reference, of course, is to the infamous James Guckert, aka Jeff Gannon. Meanwhile, back in reality there was never any evidence that "They", presumably the sinister Karl Rove White House, had any association with Talon News or that Guckert was "planted" at a Presidential press conference. In fact, Guckert showed up at the regular White House press briefing each day and on two occasions Bush swept the available reporters into impromptu press conferences. Talon News seems to have been the creation of a Texas hustler who saw a niche for a right-wing news service and was happy to intimate that he had White House connections (FWIW, I have Nigerian uncles, apparently, based on my emails). That is utterly unlike the Nico Pitney situation, where the invaluable Mr. Pitney was told the night before to be there and be square with a question from Iran.

Whatever - fantasy trumps fiction yet again. As to the Pitney situation, I think it was a clever attempt to engage the Iranian dissidents directly, whch of course flies in the face of Obama's previously stated desire to keep his distance and emphasize the home-grown nature of the Iranian revolt.

What I would keep an eye on is the breakdown in the media-Obama love-fest. What is the Beltway wisdom? Hell hath no fury like a media scorned. One can imagine the press in the role of the embittered ex-girlfriend finally realizing that they will never get Obama back. Presumably Obama (or the White House switchboard) can deal with the 3 AM phone calls. However, the press may be picking up on the meme that Obama is soulless (he processes your pain but does not actually feel it). Jake Tapper offered the allusion to the emotion-less Mr. Spock of Star Trek; other examples elude me, darn it, but the day is young! [See MORE ON LESS EMOTION, below.]

And of course on policy the stalwarts in our liberal media are disappointed by Obama's Bush-lite positions on Gitmo, torture, and gays in the military or the chapel.

I wonder how the thin-skinned Obama would hold up to a hostile media. We may find out one day soon.

MORE ON LESS EMOTION: In the course of defending the sort of date night she wishes she experienced more often Ms. Dowd wrote:

Some White House officials fretted that the Obamas’ Marine One and
Gulfstream magic-carpet ride to dinner in Greenwich Village and a play
on Broadway was too showy. Others thought it helped show a softer side
of the often dispassionate Obama.

In a stunning confession, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford admitted Wednesday to having an affair and covering up a secret
trip to visit his mistress in Argentina.

Sanford
made the admission at a press conference meant to clear up his
mysterious week-long absence. It was the latest, and most shocking,
installment in the evolving story surrounding Sanford's disappearance.

His staff initially told reporters he left town Thursday to go hiking on the Appalachian Trail,
but the governor returned Wednesday morning on a flight from Argentina.

Sanford on Wednesday afternoon admitted
he was visiting his mistress in the South American country.

The Administrator, in consultation with the Department of State and the
United States Trade Representative, shall annually prepare and certify
a report to the Congress regarding whether China and India have adopted
greenhouse gas emissions standards at least as strict as those
standards required under this Act. If the Administrator determines that
China and India have not adopted greenhouse gas emissions standards at
least as stringent as those set forth in this Act, the Administrator
shall notify each Member of Congress of his determination, and shall
release his determination to the media.

So if China and India become the world refuge for high-emissions industries, well, Congress will be notified promptly, as will the watchdog media. Good to know.

Most problematic is their complete omission of economic damage from restricting energy use. Footnote three on page four reads,
“The resource cost does not indicate the potential decrease in gross
domestic product (GDP) that could result from the cap. The reduction in
GDP would also include indirect general equilibrium effects, such as
changes in the labor supply resulting from reductions in real wages and
potential reductions in the productivity of capital and labor.” That’s
a pretty big chunk of change to ignore. In The Heritage Foundation’s
analysis of the Waxman-Markey climate change legislation, the GDP hit
in 2020 was $161 billion (2009 dollars). For a family of four, that is
$1,870 that they ignore.

What CBO does is focus on the revenue raised (and re-distributed) by the sale of emissions allowances. Since they take at face value the claim that most of the revenue will be returned to the harried consumer, they claim the cost of the bill is low.

The Heritage point has been vexing me for several days but I have not had time to pin it down. To illustrate the problem, suppose the Congress announced that in order to relieve traffic congestion, cut pollution, save gasoline, and improve traffic safety they were going to (a) lower the national speed limit to 40 MPH, and (b) impose a revenue-neutral gasoline tax of $10 per gallon, all of which would be used to fund a reduction in the payroll tax.

One might argue (as CBO did with Waxman-Markey) that since the new tax is revenue-neutral, the impact on the economy is tiny (other effects will be ignored).

Or one might argue, as per Heritage, that the huge dislocations caused by commuters switching jobs, relocating their homes, and so on might represent a huge cost to the economy in terms of lost output and reduced societal welfare, even if the net tax revenue to the government was tiny.

Who is right? Presumably, that depends on how much change Waxman-Markey imposes on the economy.

C'mon - calling for lower interest rates to stimulate the housing market and mitigate the recession of 2000/2001 is hardly the same as imploring Fannie, Freddie and the Fed to rip up all all known lending standards and take the global financial system to the abyss. Thumping Krugman for calling for a crazed housing bubble is a bash too far.

In 2001 Krugman had the very broad-based view that lower interest rates could keep the consumer moving forward until business investment picked up the baton. This view of the economy is described in the 2005 Times:

But a wide variety of indicators now suggest that the economy is in a
sweet spot: business investment is soaring; inflation appears more
moderate than a few months ago; employment is climbing, even if real
wages are not.

...

Hints of a handoff from consumer-led growth to business-led growth
are apparent at Siemens Energy and Automation of Alpharetta, Ga.

At the company, a unit of Siemens of Germany, electrical equipment
sales to industrial customers plunged by a third after 2001. Sales of
equipment to the residential housing market picked up part of the
slack, as the Federal Reserve's low interest rates prompted a
home-building boom that continued through last year.

But Harry
Volande, chief financial officer at Siemens Energy and Automation, said
industrial sales of electrical equipment and automation systems would
expand by double digits, even as sales to the residential housing
market flatten with the cooling of the housing market and a tapering
off of construction activity.

Ex post, the Fed clearly let the housing market expansion go on for too long. One might argue that Greenspan's entire economic strategy, which amounted to believing that a recession tomorrow is better than a recession today, was flawed, since the result was to lead us from one bubble to the next. But the management of the economic cycle is a pretty mainstream goal, which Krugman held and still holds.

As I summarized it awhile back, we became a nation in which people
make a living by selling one another houses, and they pay for the
houses with money borrowed from China.

Now that game seems to be
coming to an end. We're going to have to find other ways to make a
living — in particular, we're going to have to start selling goods and
services, not just I.O.U.'s, to the rest of the world, and/or replace
imports with domestic production. And adjusting to that new way of
making a living will take time.

Will we have that time? Ben
Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, contends that what's
happening in the housing market is "a very orderly and moderate kind of
cooling." Maybe he's right. But if he isn't, the stock market drop of
the last two days will be remembered as the start of a serious economic
slowdown.

Maybe the housing bubble will end badly, unless it doesn't! A more clarion call has not been sounded.

June 23, 2009

Captain Ed mocks the notion circulating in the White House that Obama's Cairo speech triggered the Iranian uprising.

On the other hand, Matt Yglesias implicitly acknowledges a reason for Team Obama to try and claim credit or maybe even show some support for the opposition [which he is now doing!]: Obama's dream of negotiating with Iran's leaders is going to be deferred:

The hope behind an engagement strategy was that the Supreme Leader
might be inclined to side with the more pragmatic actors inside the
system—guys like former president Rafsanjani and former prime minister
Mousavi. With those people, and most of the Iranian elites of their
ilk, now in open opposition to the regime, any crackdown would almost
by definition entail the sidelining of the people who might be
interested in a deal. Iran would essentially be in the hands of the
most hardline figures, people who just don’t seem interested in
improving relations with other countries.

Under the circumstances, the whole subject of American engagement may well wind up being moot.

America respects the right of all peaceful and law-abiding
voices to be heard around the world, even if we disagree with them. And
we will welcome all elected, peaceful governments – provided they
govern with respect for all their people.

Hard to see how Obama could square "welcoming" the mullahs with "respect for their people", although the 4th of July hotdog diplomacy is still on.

UPDATE: Apparently Team Obama has opted for a tougher line. Well, he had nothing to lose on the "engage with the mullahs" strategy anyway.

A Brief Wrap | 1:33 p.m. | Helene Cooper:
Well, Sheryl, he really ramped it up on Iran. We heard the president
use the word “condemn” for the first time since the Iranian elections
to describe the government’s actions. It will be interesting to see
what comes next from Tehran in response.

Sheryl Stolberg: Yes, I was struck especially by
his last answer to Suzanne Malveaux about the “heartbreaking” video. He
showed more passion than earlier in the press conference. And speaking
of passion, I was also struck by the way Mr. Obama seemed irritated
with reporters at various times during this news conference. The
cigarette question seemed to really get under his skin. He rarely loses
his cool, but there were more flashes of anger here than in the past.

If you've managed to keep a smile on your face despite the unrelentingly grim weather, you may have the temperament to weather Ross Douthat's latest column on our broken political system. A snippet:

Voters demand low taxes and generous services, and neither party has
found a way to say no and stay politically viable while saying it.

Eventually,
it’s assumed, either a liberal or a conservative majority will find a
way to square this circle. But you just have to look west to California
— polarized, and essentially bankrupt and ungovernable — to see that
there are darker possibilities.

In recent years, liberalism has
profited from the impasse. Liberals torpedoed the Bush administration’s
attempt to trim Social Security benefits. They demagogued John McCain
in 2008, when he proposed a market-based health care plan and hinted at
means-testing Medicare.

But now it’s their turn to actually run
the country. And just as Bush-era conservatives couldn’t really make
tax cuts pay for themselves, Obama-era Democrats aren’t really going to
be able to finance universal health care without substantial
middle-class tax increases, or substantial spending cuts.

No Country for Burly Men How feminist groups skewed the Obama stimulus plan towards women's jobs.by Christina Hoff Sommers

A "man-cession." That's what some economists are starting to call
it. Of the 5.7 million jobs Americans lost between December 2007 and
May 2009, nearly 80 percent had been held by men. Mark Perry, an
economist at the University of Michigan, characterizes the recession as
a "downturn" for women but a "catastrophe" for men.

Men are bearing the brunt of the current economic crisis because
they predominate in manufacturing and construction, the hardest-hit
sectors, which have lost more than 3 million jobs since December 2007.
Women, by contrast, are a majority in recession-resistant fields such
as education and health care, which gained 588,000 jobs during the same
period. Rescuing hundreds of thousands of unemployed crane operators,
welders, production line managers, and machine setters was never going
to be easy. But the concerted opposition of several powerful women's
groups has made it all but impossible. Consider what just happened with
the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Well, we had the famous Angry White Male backlash in 1994. The seeds are being sown...

June 20, 2009

The NY Times editors are so vexed by what they see as the latest blatant injustice from the Roberts Court that they can't be bothered to read the court's opinion or their own coverage of the case (Matt Yglesias keeps them company). Let's cut to the NY Times editors:

In an appalling 5-to-4 ruling on Thursday, the Supreme Court’s
conservative majority tossed aside compelling due process claims, the
demands of justice and a considered decision by a lower federal appeals court to deny the right of prisoners to obtain post-conviction DNA testing that might prove their innocence.

The inmate at the center of the case, William G. Osborne, is in
prison in Alaska after a 1994 rape conviction based in part on a DNA
test of semen from a condom recovered at the scene.

Clang! The inmate is in prison, all right, but for a conviction in a different crime following his release on parole in 2007 for this rape. From the Times news report:

There was other significant evidence of Mr. Osborne’s guilt, and he
confessed to the Alaska Board of Parole, which released him after 14
years. He later said he had lied to the parole board in the hope of
quicker release. Mr. Osborne has since been convicted of a home
invasion. [More at CS Monitor and Scripps.]

Back to the Times editors for more bleating:

The state used an old method, known as DQ-alpha testing, that could not
identify, with great specificity, the person to whom the DNA belonged.
The high court sided with Alaska in its refusal to grant Mr. Osborne
access to the physical evidence, the semen. His intent was to obtain a
more advanced DNA test that was not available at the time of his trial
and that prosecutors agreed could almost definitively prove his guilt
or innocence.

Well, his intent was to roll the bones, figuring he had nothing to lose except the expense of the test. Osborne had already passed on a more detailed test at the time of his trial, as the Times explains:

Rudimentary DNA testing on the condom in preparation for trial
excluded two other suspects and included Mr. Osborne among those who
might have committed the crime. The kind of testing used at the time,
Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “generally cannot narrow the perpetrator
down to less than 5 percent of the population.”

Mr. Osborne’s
trial lawyer decided not to pursue a second kind of DNA testing that
was more discriminating. The lawyer said she feared that the results
might further incriminate her client.

The defense strategy is presented in more detail in the opinion:

Osborne then sought postconviction relief in Alaska state court. He
claimed that he had asked his attorney, Sidney Billingslea, to seek
more discriminating restriction-fragment-length-polymorphism (RFLP) DNA
testing [Wiki] during trial, and argued that she was constitutionally
ineffective for not doing so.1 Osborne I, 110 P. 3d, at 990. Because
she believed Osborne was guilty, " 'insisting on a more advanced ...
DNA test would have served to prove that Osborne committed the alleged crimes.' " Ibid. The Alaska Court of Appeals concluded that Billingslea's decision had been strategic and rejected Osborne's claim. Id., at 991-992.

Billingslea testified that after investigation, she had concluded that
further testing would do more harm than good. She planned to mount a
defense of mistaken identity, and thought that the imprecision of the
DQ Alpha test gave her " 'very good numbers in a mistaken identity,
cross-racial identification case, where the victim was in the dark and
had bad eyesight.' "

It seems that sample size was not a problem, so the RFLP test available in 1993 would have been definitive.

As a matter of public policy, there is a legitimate question of how best to chivvy the states along as they legislate access to what amounts to new evidence made available by advances in technology. However, as the WaPo explains, this was an awkward case on which prisoner's rights advocates chose to hang their hats, since the prisoner is almost surely guilty:

Prosecutors had told the court that Osborne was not a good cause for
those worried about the wrongly convicted. He was identified as the
woman's attacker not just by her but by an accomplice. At trial, one
test of the semen found at the crime scene said it could have come from
Osborne but also from about 15 percent of the population of African
American men.

More of the case details are available in the opinion:

This lawsuit arose out of a violent crime committed 16 years ago,
which has resulted in a long string of litigation in the state and
federal courts. On the evening of March 22, 1993, two men driving
through Anchorage, Alaska, solicited sex from a female prostitute,
K. G. She agreed to perform fellatio on both men for $100 and got in
their car. The three spent some time looking for a place to stop and
ended up in a deserted area near Earthquake Park. When K. G. demanded
payment in advance, the two men pulled out a gun and forced her to
perform fellatio on the driver while the passenger penetrated her
vaginally, using a blue condom she had brought. The passenger then
ordered K. G. out of the car and told her to lie face-down in the snow.
Fearing for her life, she refused, and the two men choked her and beat
her with the gun. When K. G. tried to flee, the passenger beat her with
a wooden axe handle and shot her in the head while she lay on the
ground. They kicked some snow on top of her and left her for dead. 521
F. 3d 1118, 1122 (CA9 2008) (case below); Osborne v. State, 163 P. 3d 973, 975-976 (Alaska App. 2007) (Osborne II); App. 27, 42-44.

K. G. did not die; the bullet had only grazed her head. Once
the two men left, she found her way back to the road, and flagged down
a passing car to take her home. Ultimately, she received medical care
and spoke to the police. At the scene of the crime, the police
recovered a spent shell casing, the axe handle, some of K. G.'s
clothing stained with blood, and the blue condom. Jackson v. State, No. A-5276 etc. (Alaska App., Feb. 7, 1996), App. to Pet. for Cert. 117a.

Six days later, two military police officers at Fort Richardson
pulled over Dexter Jackson for flashing his headlights at another
vehicle. In his car they discovered a gun (which matched the shell
casing), as well as several items K. G. had been carrying the night of
the attack. Id.,
at 116a, 118a-119a. The car also matched the description K. G. had
given to the police. Jackson admitted that he had been the driver
during the rape and assault, and told the police that William Osborne
had been his passenger. 521 F. 3d, at 1122-1123; 423 F. 3d 1050,
1051-1052 (CA9 2005); Osborne v. State, 110 P. 3d 986, 990 (Alaska App. 2005) (Osborne I).
Other evidence also implicated Osborne. K. G. picked out his photograph
(with some uncertainty) and at trial she identified Osborne as her
attacker. Other witnesses testified that shortly before the crime,
Osborne had called Jackson from an arcade, and then driven off with
him. An axe handle similar to the one at the scene of the crime was
found in Osborne's room on the military base where he lived.

Hence the defense attorney's desire to steer away from a more conclusive DNA test and aim for a "mistaken identity,
cross-racial identification case", which in this scenario would have amounted to, all black guys look alike to white folks.

...The predominant thinking of Alaska in this case seems to be that the
punishment of the innocent works as a close substitute for the
punishment of the guilty, so that given the heinous nature of the crime
the state has a strong interest in convicting someone or other
of it irrespective of the facts. This is exactly the sort of madness
and injustice we rely on the judicial system to rescue us from. But not
the new Roberts Court!

I am confident that the 5 justices in the majority are comfortable that the guilty have been punished.

Amid competing essays on the courts’ role in declaring
constitutional meaning, a Supreme Court majority has handed off — as
essentially a question for the political branches of government — the
issue of when a convicted individual can get access to genetic evidence
to try to prove innocence of the crime.

...

Access to evidence for DNA testing, however, is not guaranteed by
anything in the Constitution, the Court majority concluded – at least
when the individual has had a fair trial, and is seeking the evidence
after the fact, to try to undo a conviction.

...

The majority opinion in District Attorney’s Office v. Osborne
(08-6) should not be misunderstood: it does not rule out entirely any
access, in a criminal case, to genetic evidence for DNA testing. What
it does do is narrow any legal foundation for such access, primarily by
leaving it up to 50 state legislatures and Congress to craft rules to
control access.

Justice Department lawyers told the judge that future presidents and
vice presidents may not cooperate with criminal investigations if they
know what they say could become available to their political opponents
and late-night comics who would ridicule them.

"If we become a
fact-finder for political enemies, they aren't going to cooperate,"
Justice Department attorney Jeffrey Smith said during a 90-minute
hearing. "I don't want a future vice president to say, `I'm not going
to cooperate with you because I don't want to be fodder for 'The Daily
Show.'"

Well, at least Jon Stewart is the bogeyman, not Rush or Bill. But I don't think that, following the Plame debacle, we will see a special counsel gain the cooperation of the White House anytime soon anyway. People will lawyer up or resign rather than risk a perjury charge.

America respects the right of all peaceful and law-abiding
voices to be heard around the world, even if we disagree with them. And
we will welcome all elected, peaceful governments – provided they
govern with respect for all their people.

Too inflammatory? Well, he said it two weeks ago in Cairo, back when talk was cheap.

Can Obama really hope to "welcome" Iran's leaders following a brutal crackdown? I am worried about another Tiananmen; Obama, of course, is worried about another Kent State.

MORE: Paul Wolfowitz, not necessarily the go-to guy on creating democracies, thinks Obama could do more:

It would be a cruel irony if, in an effort to avoid imposing democracy,
the United States were to tip the scale toward dictators who impose
their will on people struggling for freedom. And if we appear so
desperate for negotiations that we will abandon those who support our
principles, we weaken our own negotiating hand.

That does not mean that we need to pick sides in an Iranian election
or claim to know its result. Obama could send a powerful message simply
by placing his enormous personal prestige behind the peaceful conduct
of the demonstrators and their demand for reform -- exactly the kind of
peaceful, democratic change that he praised in his speech in Cairo.

Like the rest of the world, President Obama must have been surprised
by the magnitude of the protests in Iran. Iranians are protesting not
just election fraud but also the growing abuses of the Iranian people
by a dictatorial regime. Now is not the time for the president to dig
in to a neutral posture. It is time to change course.

Jon Chait of TNR would be even more delighted if Wolfowitz specifically, and conservatives generally, would at least address the notion that the Great Satan has a very limited role to play here and will not help the demonstrators by being linked to them, or by being perceived as meddling in Iranian affairs (again!). Dan McLaughlin obliges:

But what if President Obama did it [lent rhetorical support to the demonstrators]? If Cairo was about
anything, if it was worth anything, if the Obama Brand could ride to
the aid of the interests of the United States in a situation where a
more explicitly pro-American president could not, Obama should be
willing and able to put that brand to work in a situation where the
obvious objective truth is that he was acting to favor the
interests of an Islamic population. He should be able to draw on his
personal favorability in a crisis when something real is at stake.

Well, maybe the Muslim world needs more than one speech to fall fully in love with him - it took America a few months, if I recal the primary season.

In any case, David "I Didn't Drink The Kool Aid But I Can Describe Its Bouquet" Brooks assures us that Obama is all good on this:

Many of us have been dissatisfied with the legalistic calibrations
of the Obama administration’s response to Iran, which have been
disproportionate to the sweeping events there. We’ve been rooting for
the politicians in the administration, like Vice President Joe Biden
and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who have been working for a
more sincere and heartfelt response.

But the comments of the
first few days are not that important. What’s important is that the
Obama administration understands the scope of what is happening. And on
the big issue, my understanding is that the administration has it
exactly right.

Exactly? At this point Obama seems to be committed to pursuing negotiations and a summit (without pre-conditions, but with preparations) with Iranian leaders likely to be widely viewed as repressive and illegitimate. I am not sure that is exactly the best course.

They were handing out the photocopies by the thousand under the
plane trees in the centre of the boulevard, single sheets of paper
grabbed by the opposition supporters who are now wearing black for the
15 Iranians who have been killed in Tehran – who knows how many more in
the rest of the country? – since the election results gave Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad more than 24 million votes and a return to the presidency.
But for the tens of thousands marking their fifth day of protests
yesterday – and for their election campaign hero, Mirhossein Mousavi,
who officially picked up just 13 million votes – those photocopies were
irradiated.

For the photocopy appeared to be a genuine
but confidential letter from the Iranian minister of interior, Sadeq
Mahsuli, to Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, written on
Saturday 13 June, the day after the elections, and giving both Mr
Mousavi and his ally, Mehdi Karroubi, big majorities in the final
results. In a highly sophisticated society like Iran, forgery is as
efficient as anywhere in the West and there are reasons for both
distrusting and believing this document. But it divides the final vote
between Mr Mousavi and Mr Karroubi in such a way that it would have
forced a second run-off vote – scarcely something Mousavi's camp would
have wanted.

Headed "For the Attention of the Supreme Leader" it notes "your
concerns for the 10th presidential elections" and "and your orders for
Mr Ahmadinejad to be elected president", and continues "for your
information only, I am telling you the actual results". Mr Mousavi has
19,075,623, Mr Karroubi 13,387,104, and Mr Ahmadinejad a mere 5,698,417.

Could this letter be a fake? Even if Mr Mousavi won so many votes,
could the colourless Mr Karroubi have followed only six million votes
behind him? And however incredible Mr Ahmadinejad's officially declared
63 per cent of the vote may have been, could he really – as a man who
has immense support among the poor of Iran – have picked up only
five-and-a-half million votes? And would a letter of such immense
importance be signed only "on behalf of the minister"?

The WaPo explains why Obama is tip-toeing around the Iranian demonstrations:

U.S. Struggling for Right Response to IranObama Seeks Way to Acknowledge Protesters Without Alienating Ayatollah

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 18, 2009

The political unrest in Iran presents the Obama administration with a
dilemma: keep quiet to pursue a nuclear deal with Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, the country's supreme leader, or heed calls to respond more
supportively to the protesters there -- and risk alienating the Shiite
cleric.

...

The administration's stance is practical -- the real power in Iran
rests with Khamenei, not with whoever is president -- but pressure for
a shift in policy will mount if the protests continue to grow and begin
to threaten the government's hold on power. Obama already has been
criticized -- notably by his Republican presidential rival, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) -- as abandoning "fundamental principles" of support for human rights.

If the cat has his silver tongue, perhaps Obama could make this statement:

Let me be clear: no system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other.

That
does not lessen my commitment, however, to governments that reflect the
will of the people. Each nation gives life to this principle in its own
way, grounded in the traditions of its own people. America does not
presume to know what is best for everyone, just as we would not presume
to pick the outcome of a peaceful election. But I do have an unyielding
belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak
your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the
rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is
transparent and doesn't steal from the people; the freedom to live as
you choose. Those are not just American ideas, they are human rights,
and that is why we will support them everywhere.

There is no
straight line to realize this promise. But this much is clear:
governments that protect these rights are ultimately more stable,
successful and secure. Suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them
go away. America respects the right of all peaceful and law-abiding
voices to be heard around the world, even if we disagree with them. And
we will welcome all elected, peaceful governments – provided they
govern with respect for all their people.

A bit too pointed, perhaps? If the United States welcomes all elected, peaceful government, what is our stance towards repressive regimes who maintain their power by way of rigged elections?

But maybe Obama will be brave enough to say something like this in response to the situation in Iran - after al, he said it to 'Hosannas' a mere two weeks ago in Cairo.

Fascinating stuff from THE Robert Fisk, who is walking the streets of Teheran with impunity and urging other Western reporters to do the same:

No-one's told me not to drive around so I go and see wounded people
and go and watch these confrontations and no-one seems to bother me.

I rather think an awful lot of journalists take it too seriously. If
you get in a car and go out and see things, no-one's going to stop you,
frankly.

Let's go to the buried lead:

My suspicion is that [Ahmadinejad] might have actually won the
election but more like 52 or 53 per cent. It's possible that Mousavi
got closer to 38 per cent.

But I think the Islamic republic's regime here wanted to humiliate
the opponent and so fiddle the figures, even if Ahmadinejad had won.

The problem with that is they're now going to claim they're going to
need a recount. If the recount is to actually give Mousavi the
presidency, someone is going to have to pay the price for such an
extraordinary fraud of claiming Ahmadinejad won 30, 40, 50 per cent
more than he should have done.

And what about the military?

I've just been witnessing a confrontation, in dusk and into the
night, between about 15,000 supporters of Ahmadinejad - supposedly the
president of Iran - who are desperate to down the supporters of Mr
Mousavi, who thinks he should be the president of Iran.

There were about 10,000 Mousavi men and women on the streets, with
approximately 500 Iranian special forces, trying to keep them apart.

It was interesting that the special forces - who normally take the
side of Ahmadinejad's Basij militia - were there with clubs and sticks
in their camouflage trousers and their purity white shirts and on this
occasion the Iranian military kept them away from Mousavi's men and
women.

In fact at one point, Mousavi's supporters were shouting 'thank you, thank you' to the soldiers.

One woman went up to the special forces men, who normally are very
brutal with Mr Mousavi's supporters, and said 'can you protect us from
the Basij?' He said 'with God's help'.

It was quite extraordinary because it looked as if the military
authorities in Tehran have either taken a decision not to go on
supporting the very brutal militia - which is always associated with
the presidency here - or individual soldiers have made up their own
mind that they're tired of being associated with the kind of brutality
that left seven dead yesterday - buried, by the way secretly by the
police - and indeed the seven or eight students who were killed on the
university campus 24 hours earlier.

It is only one incident, of course, but it does fly against this guest piece in the Times which argued that Ahmadinejad, a former officer in the Revolutionary Guard had remade the Iranian government as a military dictatorship:

Disenchantment with clerical rule has been growing for years. To the
urban youths who make up Iran’s most active political class, the
mullahs represent the crude rigidity of Islamic law. To the rural poor,
they epitomize the corruption that has meant unbuilt schools, unpaved
roads and unfulfilled promises of development.

This hostility
overflowed during the 2005 presidential race, with the defeat of former
President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a cleric widely considered
corrupt, by Mr. Ahmadinejad, a former officer in the Revolutionary
Guards.

In Mr. Ahmadinejad, the public saw a man who repudiated
the profligacy of the clerical class, a man who was ascetic, humble and
devout. And he capitalized on that image to consolidate power and to
promote his brothers in arms. Fourteen of the 21 cabinet ministers he
has appointed are former members of the guards or its associated
paramilitary, the Basij. Several, including Defense Minister Mostafa
Mohammad Najjar, are veterans of notorious units thought to have
supported terrorist operations in the 1980s.

Well, I have no doubt Fisk saw what he saw.

This is more cold water on the notion that reform may be taking hold in Iran:

[The protest] is absolutely not against the Islamic republic or the Islamic revolution.

It's clearly an Islamic protest against specifically the
personality, the manner, the language of Ahmadinejad. They absolutely
despise him but they do not hate or dislike the Islamic republic that
they live in.

That ties in to the point that Mousavi was also hand-picked by the mullahs before he was allowed to stand for election.

The President yesterday denounced the "extent of the fraud" and the
"shocking" and "brutal" response of the Iranian regime to public
demonstrations in Tehran these past four days.

"These elections are an atrocity," he said. "If [Mahmoud]
Ahmadinejad had made such progress since the last elections, if he won
two-thirds of the vote, why such violence?" The statement named the
regime as the cause of the outrage in Iran and, without meddling or
picking favorites, stood up for Iranian democracy.

The French are hardly known for their idealistic foreign policy and
moral fortitude. Then again many global roles are reversing in the era
of Obama. The American President didn't have anything to say the first
two days after polls closed in Iran on Friday and an improbable
landslide victory for Mr. Ahmadinejad sparked the protests. "I have
deep concerns about the election," he said yesterday at the White
House, when he finally did find his voice. "When I see violence
directed at peaceful protestors, when I see peaceful dissent being
suppressed, wherever that takes place, it is of concern to me and it's
of concern to the American people."

Spoken like a good lawyer. Mr. Obama didn't call the vote
fraudulent, though he did allow that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
"understands the Iranian people have deep concerns about the election."
This is a generous interpretation of the Supreme Leader's effort to
defuse public rage by mooting a possible recount of select precincts.
"How that plays out," Mr. Obama said, "is ultimately for the Iranian
people to decide." Sort of like the 2000 Florida recount, no doubt.

Whoa - is this MY Wall Street Journal praising the French and mocking Florida 2000? How far has the Iranian revolution reached?

"No one in their right mind can believe" the official results from
Friday's contest, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri said of the
landslide victory claimed by Ahmadinejad. Montazeri accused the regime
of handling Mousavi's charges of fraud and the massive protests of his
backers "in the worst way possible."

"A
government not respecting people's vote has no religious or political
legitimacy," he declared in comments on his official Web site. "I ask
the police and army personals (personnel) not to 'sell their religion,'
and beware that receiving orders will not excuse them before God."

Rather than offering any crumbs of support to the Iranians who are
literally putting their lives on the line for their own freedom, Barack
Obama could only manage "deep concerns." In Obamaland, it's not as
important to offer even moral support to people trying to shake off the
yoke of a barbaric dictatorship as it is to not appear to be "meddling."

This
all sounds quite familiar, and everyone over 30 has seen it before. Did
somebody replace the "community activist" with a self-righteous peanut
farmer while we weren't looking?

...I've met a lot of Eastern Europeans who have pictures of Ronald Reagan
on their mantles. They never forgot the way he stood up for them, in
public, against the commissars. Iran's population is going to run off
the mullahs one of these years, hopefully this year. When that happens,
what do you want them to remember, that we were supporting them, or
worrying about what their oppressors would think about it?

For, in fact, Obama never meant to spark political upheaval in Iran,
much less encourage the Iranian people to take to the streets. That
they are doing so is not good news for the president but, rather, an
unwelcome complication in his strategy of engaging and seeking
rapprochement with the Iranian government on nuclear issues.

One of the great innovations in the Obama administration's approach
to Iran, after all, was supposed to be its deliberate embrace of the
Tehran rulers' legitimacy. In his opening diplomatic gambit, his
statement to Iran on the Persian new year in March, Obama went out of
his way to speak directly to Iran's rulers, a notable departure from
George W. Bush's habit of speaking to the Iranian people over their
leaders' heads. As former Clinton official Martin Indyk put it at the time, the wording was carefully designed "to demonstrate acceptance of the government of Iran."

This approach had always been a key element of a "grand bargain" with
Iran. The United States had to provide some guarantee to the regime
that it would no longer support opposition forces or in any way seek
its removal. The idea was that the United States could hardly expect
the Iranian regime to negotiate on core issues of national security,
such as its nuclear program, so long as Washington gave any
encouragement to the government's opponents. Obama had to make a
choice, and he made it. This was widely applauded as a "realist"
departure from the Bush administration's quixotic and counterproductive
idealism.

So Obama has been, to use the soccer metaphor, wrong-footed. Hmm, to a basketball player that would be something like picking up the dribble too soon. [Mark Coffey has more.]

THE WORLD HAS CHANGED FOREVER: You are not ready for what comes next:

The President yesterday denounced the "extent of the fraud" and the
"shocking" and "brutal" response of the Iranian regime to public
demonstrations in Tehran these past four days.

"These elections are an atrocity," he said. "If [Mahmoud]
Ahmadinejad had made such progress since the last elections, if he won
two-thirds of the vote, why such violence?" The statement named the
regime as the cause of the outrage in Iran and, without meddling or
picking favorites, stood up for Iranian democracy.

The French are hardly known for their idealistic foreign policy and
moral fortitude. Then again many global roles are reversing in the era
of Obama. The American President didn't have anything to say the first
two days after polls closed in Iran on Friday and an improbable
landslide victory for Mr. Ahmadinejad sparked the protests. "I have
deep concerns about the election," he said yesterday at the White
House, when he finally did find his voice. "When I see violence
directed at peaceful protestors, when I see peaceful dissent being
suppressed, wherever that takes place, it is of concern to me and it's
of concern to the American people."

June 16, 2009

Sarah Palin accepts David Letterman's current groveling, but her statement provides new fodder for the late night crew (my emphasis):

In a statement to
FOXNews.com early Tuesday, the Alaska governor said, "Of course it's
accepted on behalf of young women, like my daughters, who hope men who
'joke' about public displays of sexual exploitation of girls will soon
evolve."

"Letterman certainly has the
right to 'joke' about whatever he wants to, and thankfully we have the
right to express our reaction," Palin said. "This is all thanks to our
U.S. Military women and men putting their lives on the line for us to
secure America's Right to Free Speech - in this case, may that right be
used to promote equality and respect."

Only the brave men and women of the US military stood between us and a full Letterman takeover? A grateful nation gives thanks, but where were they when Joe Buck unleashed Artie Lange?

An analysis released Monday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office
raised the hurdles for draft legislation in the Senate just as its
Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee planned to begin voting
on Wednesday. The office concluded that a plan by the committee’s
Democratic leaders, Senators Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Christopher J. Dodd
of Connecticut, would reduce the number of uninsured only by a net 16
million people. Even if the bill became law, the budget office said, 36
million people would remain uninsured in 2017.

That finding came as a surprise. Robert D. Reischauer,
an economist who headed the budget office when Congress tackled the
health care issue in the Clinton administration, said that if so many
people remained uninsured, it might not be feasible to cut special
federal payments to hospitals that serve many low-income people.

Mr. Obama said Saturday that the government could save $106 billion
over 10 years by cutting such hospital payments as more people gained
coverage.

William Galston was cogent on the cost question, writing in The New Republic recently:

What I found suggests that little happened, during either the campaign
or the first four months of the Obama administration, to educate the
people about the real choices their elected representatives now face.
As the discussion of legislative options becomes more precise, the
people will be in for some rude surprises--and advocates of fundamental
reform will have a harder time making their case than they now believe.

David Brooks offers a canny preview of the upcoming political theatre. A snippet about where we are in Obama's process now:

In stage two, you pass everything over to Congress. You’ll need
these windbags at the end, so you might as well get them busy at the
beginning. This will produce a whirl of White Papers, a flurry of
committee activity, a set of legislative rivalries as every chairman in
the stable seeks to be the lead horse in the romp to legislative glory.
All you have to do is raise a portentous eyebrow from time to time,
signaling grand approval of the various proposals as they blow by.

This brings us to the current stage: The Long Tease. Every player in
this game has a favorite idea, and you are open to all of them. The
liberals want a public plan, and you’re for it. The budget guys are for
slashing Medicare reimbursements, and you’re for that. The doctors want
relief from lawsuits, and you’re open to it. The Republicans want you
to cap the tax exemption on employee health benefits. You campaigned
against that, but you’re still privately for it.

You ran on a
platform of hope and, boy, are you delivering. Every special interest
in Washington lives in hope that they will get their pet idea
incorporated into the final bill.

...No study, these critics say, has ever proved a causal relationship
between moderate drinking and lower risk of death — only that the two
often go together. It may be that moderate drinking is just something
healthy people tend to do, not something that makes people healthy.
“The moderate drinkers tend to do everything right — they exercise,
they don’t smoke, they eat right and they drink moderately,” said Kaye
Middleton Fillmore, a retired sociologist from the University of
California, San Francisco, who has criticized the research. “It’s very
hard to disentangle all of that, and that’s a real problem.”

Oddly, a similar problem confounds the folks who insist that exercise promotes good health.